Long Term Care Accomplishments in National HIT Efforts

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In an effort to advance the utilization of health information technology in long term care facilities and to provide for the exchange of electronic health record information between all health care sectors, the LTC industry has been and remains actively involved in HIT initiatives and standards development organizations, including:

LTC stakeholder associations successfully petitioned the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT to include LTC in the scope of work of the AHIC successor model.LTC representation on the AHIC Chronic Care Workgroup was achieved in 2007.

LTC stakeholder associations joined together and successfully petitioned CCHIT to include the LTC nursing home community in its roadmap for expanded certification activities in 2007.

The LTC industry, under a leadership team representing ASPE, AHIMA, HL7, and NCPDP, has formed a 120 member workgroup to develop a LTC Electronic Health Record System Functional Profile based on the ANSI approved HL7 EHR-S Functional Model.This profile will be balloted through HL7 and supplied to CCHIT for use in development of LTC EHR certification requirements in 2008.

The LTC industry has gained representation on the CCHIT Foundation Workgroup in 2007.

At the request of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the LTC industry submitted a setting specific scenario for consideration in response to the request for public comments on the 2007 Medication Management Use Case.

An LTC working group of NCPDP has been working since 2004 to specify e-prescribing standards for nursing homes.

An LTC workgroup as part of HL7 EHR technical committee (2003) successfully balloted a minimum function set (MFS) in 2004.

The HL7 Community Based Collaborative Care (CBCC) Special Interest Group has been working to contribute LTC use cases and advocates long term care perspectives to HL7 technical committees and promotes use of HL7 standards in LTC.

Members of the LTC industry have contributed to the development of the HL7/ASTM CCD Implementation Guide that will support the electronic exchange of clinical documents.

The Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST), a program of the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA) developed an EHR/PHR task group in 2003. The task group has participated in standards development and advocacy, promotes EHR adoption in the LTC industry, and represents the LTC agenda at HL7 and IHE.

The CHI and NCVHS have endorsed HIT content and messaging standards needed to enable the standardized exchange and reuse of assessment (e.g., MDS) data.

LTC stakeholder associations have actively worked together holding annual LTC HIT Summits to develop an HIT Road Map for LTC since 2005.Planning for the 2008 Summit will begin in the next few months.